Category Archives: Transportation

This is NOT the kind of park Robbie Good and Angela Hunt are talking about.

Six years ago — my, how time crawls — then-Dallas City Council member Angela Hunt pitched what she called the Trinity River Corridor Project Plan B, which involved forgetting all about the Trinity River toll road and moving ahead with, among other things, the long-approved park between the levees. Little has changed since then: We’re still arguing about the merits of the toll road, while the park remains parked (for the most part) save for the Trinity Skyline Trail that Hunt and Scott Griggs had to fight for even after getting the council’s OK.

Which is why graphic designer Robbie Good just launched what he’s calling the Trinity Park Collaborative, an idea hatched following a sitdown last week with Hunt about the potential for filling in the greenspace between the levees.

At the moment it’s little more than a website and a fledgling Twitter account and a Facebook page. But Good says he hopes the endeavor winds up serving as a “a community liaison for existing Trinity groups” and neighborhoods near the Trinity, from the Design District to La Bajada in West Dallas to the Cedars to South Dallas.

“The toll road and park are at odds,” says Good. “You can’t have a great park with a toll road. You just can’t. Anybody who has any imagination can look into the floodplain and see that. It’s depressing what it’ll to do the value of the park, the experience of the park. And to see what Houston has done with the Buffalo Bayou is a huge slap in the face. It’s like they’re trying to insult us with that: ‘Wow, we can’t get our stuff together on this.’”

Technically Hunt’s not involved with the collaborative — technically. But the woman who fought harder than anyone to kill the road in 2007 says today that she “absolutely want[s] to be involved in creating the Trinity park voters have wanted since 1998.”

Says the former council member, “I love the idea of letting folks know the people who are opposed to this toll road are opposed not simply because they believe a high-speed, limited-access massive toll road is a bad idea from a transportation perspective. It’s about being for the park. It’s having a vision for Dallas that includes this incredible greenspace in the heart of our city. And it’s a vision of protecting this for generations to come.” Continue reading →

The mayor doesn’t want Scott Griggs doing this without warning at council meetings anymore.

Two weeks ago a couple of Dallas City Council members debated the pros and cons of a toll road between the Trinity River levees. And, as it turns out, Mayor Mike Rawlings isn’t happy about it. At all.

On Wednesday he sent the council a memo telling them to stop talking about things that aren’t on the council’s agenda. Insists Rawlings, doing so violates the Texas Open Meetings Act.

The toll road wasn’t on the council’s agenda, but the debate — pitting pro-roader Rick Callahan against Scott Griggs — wasn’t exactly unprompted: Three people on the city secretary’s public-speakers list stepped to the open mic to proselytize in favor of the Trinity River toll road, among them Gelinda Aguirre, the former secretary for Vonciel Jones Hill (head of the council’s Transportation & Trinity River Project Committee and an ardent toll road supporter), and Pleasant Grove resident Yolanda Williams, council member Rick Callahan’s current appointee to the Dallas Park Board. Said Williams, southern residents “always get caught in the middle” during election season. “We voted for it twice,” she said in support of the toll road. “Why do we have to fight? … We are tired. We said we want it.”

At which point toll road opponent Scott Griggs chimed in with a lengthy speech in which he called the long-proposed, long-unbuilt $1.5-billion-or-so toll road “the biggest boondoggle there is” and “nothing but a sales job based on some water colors.” The longer he spoke, the more passionate he became. Watch for yourself below. Go right to the 43:26 mark.

But as our Brandon Formby pointed out two weeks ago, the whole thing made Dallas City Attorney Warren Ernst very uncomfortable, to the point where he told Mayor Pro Tem Tennell Atkins, acting as mayor in Rawlings’ absence, to shut it down since the topic wasn’t on the agenda. That didn’t sit well with Callahan, who said, “This gets to hit the press, this gets to hit the TV waves and you’re trying to mute my voice.” Others ultimately weighed in as well.

And Rawlings wants that to stop. Now.

“I was unable to attend the March 4, 2015 city council meeting, but I watched the video of it,” he says in the memo you can read below. “I asked Warren Ernst to clarify the confusion about what responses to public inquiry or comments are permitted during the city council meeting public comment open microphone portion of the agenda. The key point is that, while the Act allows for open microphone speakers to address the city council on topics of their choosing, it does not mean that councilmembers are then free to further deliberate or discuss the topic raised.” Continue reading →

The Official Portrait of the City of Dallas, suitable for framing (G.J. McCarthy/Staff photographer)

Dallas’ streets are far safer when they’re covered in ice and snow; at least then you’re stuck at home or inching along the slick concrete. But now, after two weeks pockmarked by three winter storms, Dallas’ streets are close to untraversable unless you’re behind the wheel of a Lunar Roving Vehicle. Ask anyone who’s been out and about — like, oh, Advocate Media president Rick Warme, who would love to tell you the tale of the world-class pothole on Mockingbird near Skillman that only cost him $197. I now use potholes when I give directions: Take a left at that ditch in the middle of Lemmon, then a right on what used to be Inwood.

Dallas City Hall insists it’s on the pothole problem. Jerry Ortega, assistant director of Dallas’ Streets Services Department, says his crews are going to work 12-hour shifts every day between now and March 14 to get the worst ones. It’s not easy, not yet: Monday’s rain is worsening conditions and hampering repair efforts.

As a result of the rain, he says, his guys are using cold-mix asphalt, which is only good for temporary repairs. But when the sun comes out tomorrow, he says, they’ll go with the hot-mix asphalt.

“The cold mix has basically a very short life,” he says, “while the hot mix becomes part of the asphalt.”

Street Services divides the city into four “districts,” and Ortega says beginning tomorrow four patch trucks will patrol each one — with two heading north to south and two others heading south to north. They will respond to calls as they come in. And they’re coming in. All. The. Time.

“We’re divided the work this way for efficiency’s sake,” says Ortega, “and to send a message to the residents that we’re covering it. We’re seeing that spike. Calls are coming in. That’s why we had them work Saturday. Our emergency crews kept going, and it will be 12-hour days between now and the 14th, and we’ll keep going until the number of pothole calls starts going down.”

Not sure that’ll ever happen: As we determined in February 2014, Dallas’ streets are $900 million worth of pitiful. The winter weather only served to up that price tag. Says Ortega, he’s about to go back to the city council with a plan of attack. Until then, be careful. Either you’re dodging a pothole or dodging someone else who’s dodging a pothole. No doubt each of us can name a dozen major streets that are about to swallow you whole. Maybe we oughta do that in the comments.

“The older the neighborhood, the more vulnerable they are to pothole generation,” says Ortega. We’re members of the Pothole Generation.

“They have more cracks, and the life expectancy of the material beneath is getting older and looser as it has more water contact,” he says. “That’s a good rule of thumb: The older the street, the more vulnerable it becomes. You don’t get every pothole in time. But we strive to do so.”

Olive splits the park into two pieces, rendering the smaller bit next to Pearl Street something of an afterthought for those not willing to cross a three-lane street with cars on it.

A traffic study months in the making stops just short of saying it would be impossible to close the section of Olive Street that runs through Klyde Warren Park.

Says the report, done by Lee Engineering, Olive Street carries more than 1,000 vehicles during the afternoon “peak hour.” Those cars would likely be diverted to Pearl and Akard Streets.

A “diversion of this magnitude is predicted to create queuing and operational issues at other signalized intersections in the study area, primarily the Pearl and Akard intersections with Woodall Rodgers, along with the Pearl at McKinney intersection,” says the study. “Other intersections throughout the network will also experience some undesirable effects.”

Click to enlarge: from Lee Engineering's traffic study finished in January

As we first reported in July, the Woodall Rodgers Park Foundation Board, led by chairman Jody Grant, has been urging city officials for more than a year to look at closing Olive to vehicular traffic in order to make the park safer and more pedestrian-friendly. News of the discussion at Dallas City Hall caught Arts District, Uptown Dallas and Downtown Dallas Inc. officials more than a little off-guard last summer.

City records show that in May, city officials agreed to pay Lee Engineering $49,393 to “study traffic effects of closing Olive Street between the Woodall Rodgers frontage roads” and “evaluate conversion of St Paul to two way traffic.” The council never voted on conducting the study because it wasn’t informed of its existence: The contract with Lee Engineering came in just a few dollars shy of the $50,000 threshold needed for council approval. The study was completed in January and has been presented in recent days to Grant and officials at Downtown Dallas Inc., whose traffic task force, spearheaded by architect Larry Good, is evaluating its results.

“Issues like this are not cut and dried and will always be part of on-going change as downtown evolves and changes,” Downtown Dallas Inc. President and CEO John Crawford says via email. “Changes like this are part of an evolving process that will continue to be evaluated to accommodate the changing needs of a thriving and vibrant downtown. Our DDI Task Force is focused on this and other gateways to better prepare downtown for the future.”

Grant says the study’s just the beginning of the beginning of the conversation — “the second inning of a nine-inning game,” as he likes to put it. Continue reading →

For close to a year the city’s been promising the roll-out of an app and website that lets Dallas drivers find — and, even better, price and pay for — parking spots. The future is now: Assistant City Manager Eric Campbell sent the Dallas City Council a note Friday night announcing the long-awaited arrival of Southern California-HQ’d ParkMe, which maps parking lots, garages and meters and in most instances lets drivers reserve a spot before they start their engines. Even better, it tells you where the cheap parking meters are — usually, blocks from the insanely expensive ones.

This isn’t exactly new tech: As Campbell points out in his memo to council, Austin and New York and Miami and Los Angeles and other big cities have been using it for a while — L.A. and Santa Monica since December 2012, New York since 2013. ParkMe says it’s operating in 1,800 cities spread across 40 countries; Dallas is just the latest (but, no, not the last, even if it just feels like it).

It’s pretty simple to use: Call up the app or the website and tell it where you’re going, at which point it’ll direct you to the nearest parking option using what the city calls “limited real-time parking availability.” (In some cities, among them Manhattan, ParkMe has boots on the ground collecting info about what’s available where. We’ve asked the city and ParkMe for further info about how it’s collecting Dallas’ data and will update when someone calls back.) In many instances you can reserve a spot, if you’re that desperate to keep from walking a few blocks; ParkMe will also let you know when you’re time’s about to expire, if you’ve parked by the hour. (It works with the already-in-place PayByPhone app, which does come in mighty handy for us on-the-street parkers who come up short a little spare change.) The crowd-sourced Parkopedia’s been mapping downtown’s parking spots, but doesn’t give you the ability to reserve and pay for spots.

“This is a great step in making travel around the City easier for our citizens and visitors,” Dallas City Manager A.C. Gonzalez says in a media release that went out this morning. “This app is an asset to drivers in Dallas.” He’s seconded by Downtown Dallas Inc. President John Crawford, who says that “creating a user-friendly, easily navigable experience when parking downtown is key.”

Crawford ought to be excited: Downtown Dallas Inc. has been talking about how to “Reform the Approach to Parking” for years as part of its Downtown Dallas 360 plan. Says so right there: “Evaluate integrated on-street management systems that utilize GPS and wireless sensors such as ‘Street Line’ and ‘Street Smart.’” Only took a few years.

So says Mayor Mike Rawlings in a video recap-slash-look-ahead posted on Christmas Eve, which touches on all the Big Events of 2014 (Ebola, the city’s dropping homicide rate, the can’t-kill-it Trinity River toll road) and sneaks a peek at the agenda of his second term, assuming, of course, he’s elected to a second term.

The first part deals with the usual suspects — Ebola, chief among them, as well as the city’s dropping crime rate. Says Rawlings about our October, “We are so proud of how the citizens acted during that time.” Dallasites, for the most part, were all about “science first, not scare tactics.” He also thanks a Dallas Police Department — “our police officers do a great job” — that found itself dealing with 15 officer-involved shootings in 2014.

He then touches on the reasons why he decided to run again for mayor, and points to the four major themes of his second term: growing southern Dallas, focusing on education, making Dallas “a city were artists come and live and perform and write plays and paint paintings and write music” and “continuing to dial up our international presence.”

And then, of course, there’s The Road That Has Not Been Built and Will Not Die.

Says Rawlings of the Trinity River toll road, “To me it’s imperative that we’re able to connect our cities together, connect mothers with their kids to their jobs that they’ve got in North Dallas and other places and do it in a way that doesn’t take an hour to get back and forth. That’s one of the reasons I’m a big supporter of that.

And he wants you to elect a good new city council, something on which we can all agree.

In advance of that vote, Jack Bewley — owner of Irving Holdings, the parent company of Yellow Cab and seven other taxi operators in the city — has dispatched to the council a note in which he warns that approving Uber here will turn Dallas into New Delhi, where a driver is accused of raping a passenger. Uber has since been banned there, as well as in Thailand and Spain.

“Will the Dallas City Council learn the lessons of New Delhi in time? Or will Dallas subject its citizens to an increasingly dangerous experiment with unregulated companies like Uber and Lyft?” says the missive sent to council members and media Monday night. “The New Delhi rape is just the latest in a long series of criminal acts involving Uber drivers here and around the world. In the US, there have been numerous allegations of molestation, physical attacks by drivers on passengers, and tragedies where Uber drivers hit and killed people. Right now, Uber and companies like it operate here illegally. On Wednesday, the Dallas City Council is set to vote on whether to change that – and what, if any, standards the fledgling businesses should meet before being trusted with the lives of Dallas residents.”

Bewley said this morning he sent the letter because he needed to air his grievances before the vote, and he’s lost his forum “now that there are no more meetings, no more task forces.”

“I am not just speaking for our company, I am speaking for the taxicab industry,” he says. “I have the backing of the drivers as well. These are the three items we’re after. They’re all public safety issues: 24-7 insurance, drug tests and background checks.”

The ordinance — which is below, alongside Bewley’s missive — doesn’t mention drug testing; it says only that “an operating authority shall employ, maintain, and enforce as to its drivers a zero tolerance policy prohibiting the use of intoxicating substances.” It does deal with background checks and outlines all the things that would keep a driver from getting a permit (including “a sexual offense as described in Chapter 21 of the Texas Penal Code”), but leaves them in the hands of the individual operating authorities. And it covers insurance — or at least the need for a policy “from the time a driver accepts a ride request, either by being physically hailed or dispatched, to the time the passenger exits the vehicle …” Continue reading →

Mary Suhm's no longer Dallas City Manager, but she's still working with Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings on the Trinity River toll road

Mayor Mike Rawlings has always supported a a nearly nine-mile-long toll road along the east levee of the Trinity River, the so-called Trinity Parkway, and on Thursday he once again made his position crystal clear: The road, he wrote in an email sent to about 150 people, “is critical to the future of our city.” But the mayor now says he also wants to “take a deep breath, a time-out” and look at ways to make the parkway less “divisive.”

And on Wednesday, at a “Trinity Parkway Breakfast” scheduled for 8:15 a.m. at a Trinity Groves eatery, he will detail plans for a so-called design summit that will include several out-of-town experts hired to give the toll road another look despite the fact its design is 30-percent finished.

“I want to have a parkway that the citizens of Dallas enjoy because it helps the mobilization and because it’s something they’re proud of,” Rawlings says. “I don’t want to have something divisive. The question is: Can we get that? That’s what I’ve been asking a lot of people in the last three months. Every time I turn around, whether it’s fundraisers of philanthropists or people in the business community or those who are anti the toll road, I’ve asked: Is the art of the possible here? That’s what I want to focus on in the short time we have in the design process.”

Wednesday’s “Trinity Parkway Breakfast” was intended to be a small affair including proponents and opponents of the toll road to whom Rawlings would detail his plans for the summit before a larger public meeting. But moments after it was sent it landed on Facebook, shared by toll road foes who do not want to see a six lanes of high-speed concrete poured between the Trinity River levees and next to the long-promised amenities.

Council member Scott Griggs says that no amount of tweaking will lead to anything more than what you've already seen designed here.

In an interview with The Dallas Morning News Friday, Rawlings confirmed that next week’s announcement is tied to the Trinity Commons Foundation’s fund-raising efforts intended to pay for what’s been described as a “design summit” that could — could — alter the final design of the parkway, which is already 30 percent complete. Those fund-raising efforts have been spearheaded by former Dallas City Manager Mary Suhm and Trinity Commons Foundation Executive Director Craig Holcomb.

Suhm said Friday that several outsiders have signed on to take a new look at the toll road. She wouldn’t reveal their names, but says they will include “transportation engineers, urban designers, economic development people.” Rawlings will say only that “I will reveal names if there are names.”

But sources familiar with the design summit have long said Alex Krieger will be among those included, and his involvement alone could be significant. After all, Krieger’s the urban design professor at Harvard who co-authored Dallas’ decade-old Balanced Vision Plan for the Trinity River and returned to Dallas in September to apologize for the massive highway planned between the levees. Kriger said in September that he still believes in a slow-speed, four-lane road between the levees, but the highway currently being proposed — the so-called Alternative 3C — would be “detrimental to the Trinity corridor and probably would not serve traffic particularly well long-term in Dallas.” Krieger could not be reached at either of his offices Friday. Continue reading →

You may have noticed traffic in front of Dallas Love Field is getting bad. It's going to get worse.

As our Steve Brown notes this morning, the modernized Dallas Love Field and the modified Wright Amendment are about to land major changes up and down Mockingbird Lane in front of the city-owned airport. There’s just one problem: City officials are concerned that traffic on Mockingbird is about to become untenable, thanks to a very likely and potentially very significant uptick in vehicular traffic to Love Field, which has but the single entrance off Cedar Springs Road and Mockingbird.

“The main lanes would go underneath, and folks going to the airport would stay at grade,” says Keith Manoy, the assistant public works director who oversees most of the city’s transportation projects. “It wouldn’t be a tunnel, but it could be cut and covered. For now, what I feel safe in saying is we’re looking at a grade separation.”

Many questions remain to be answered, chief among them: How long would it run, how much would it cost, and who would pay for it?

The Spring Valley "tunnel" below N. Central Expressway is the likely role model for what Dallas officials are looking at in front of Mockingbird.

Would it go from, oh, Lemmon Avenue-Airdrome Drive to Denton Drive? Or would it run just “several hundred feet” in front of the airport, as Manoy suggests? Right now, it’s hard to say: The city’s so early in the process, says Manoy, “it’s hard to say how long it would need to be.” As for the cost, again, it’s early yet. But if and when the city decides to build the thing, Manoy says, it would likely come from a future bond program. There’s also been talk of Love Field kicking in to cover some of the costs.

But the city’s aviation director, Mark Duebner, seems dubious about the airport footing some of the bill. After all, he says, the roadwork would be just outside the airport’s boundaries, which means “it would be difficult for us to justify expending airport funds off-airport.” But just a moment later he adds this: “We’re looking into participating, because it does impact our customers. We’re just not there yet.”

And, after all, Love Field’s growing customer base is the cause for the likely Mockingbird makeover (or make-under, as the case may be). Continue reading →

From left: Council members Philip Kingston, Adam Medrano and Rick Callahan were at Main Street Garden Tuesday morning for the official Zipcar roll-out.

After several false starts, Zipcar — the by-the-hour or by-the-day car-rental service — pulled into downtown Dallas Tuesday morning. And at the wheel was council member Philip Kingston, who, for some reason, was wearing a white Bell racing helmet and driving gloves despite the second-long drive in a red Mini Cooper from one end of Main Street Garden to the other before this morning’s formal announcement. The downtown rep could be heard mumbling something about “safety first.”

Zipcar, which starts at $8 per hour or $73 for the whole day, has actually been around downtown for a while, at Dallas Love Field and on the SMU and UT Dallas campuses, where there are a total of 19 cars available. But today it finally pulled into three city-owned parking spots in downtown (at Pioneer Plaza and beneath Woodall Rodgers Freeway near the Perot Museum of Nature and Science) and Oak Lawn (at the Dallas Public Library’s branch on Cedar Springs Road. For now Dallas will have six Zipcars as part of a parking pilot program run by the Dallas Police Department, but Zipcar and city officials say they expect to see it expand sooner than later — into both private and publicly owned lots from downtown to Uptown, Deep Ellum to the Cedars.

Says Dan Curtin, Zipcar’s vice president of new markets, Zipcar’s so-called “members,” or customers, will ultimately decide where the cars will go. Ideally, he says, they’re within a five-minute walking distance of businesses and offices. After all, he says, they need to be convenient to folks who need cars on occasion — to go to the grocery store, say — but don’t want to own one. Dallas, he says, will need to “create a network” of members before expansion accelerates. At this morning’s kick-off, Zipcar workers set up several posters in Main Street Garden and asked passers-by to use thumbtacks to show where they’re like to see more cars in downtown, Uptown, the Cedars and Deep Ellum.

One of six Zipcars in Dallas as part of the city's official parking pilot program

“Early adopters will travel 15 to 20 minutes to pick up their car,” says Curtin. “But if you want to get traction you need five minutes.”

Right now, Dallas will count among its offerings a Mini, a BMW 528i, ap ickup, a Toyota Prius and a Ford Escape. But eventually Dallas will need more than six cars. In New York City there are some 3,000; in Boston, close to 1,200. But Donzell Gipson, the DPD assistant director tasked with the parking pilot, says “this is just the beginning.” When asked when Dallas might see more Zipcars in city-owned spots, he says it’s possible “before the end of the calendar year.”

Council member Adam Medrano, who also represents downtown, said the “unique option” that is Zipcar will “make Dallas a better place to live, work and play.” Kingston added that Zipcar’s arrival offers Dallas a “competitive advantage” over neighboring cities.

And urban designer Patrick Kennedy, who was car-free long before it became a catchphrase, says Zipcar “is a step in the right direction,” along with the likes of Uber, DART and other transportation options that allow people to either park their cars or ditch them altogether. Zipcar, he says, offers mobility without the expense that comes with owning a ride. Says Kennedy, Zipcar is just “one more step toward Dallas becoming a real city.”